One of the crowning achievements of the Fantastic Beasts franchise is the imaginative creatures - oh and the vast magical landscapes.

Fantastic Beasts earned two Academy Award nominations for its production design and costume design, winning an Oscar for the latter. The more recent Crimes of Grindelwald was nominated for a BAFTA for its visual effects too.

But who is behind the wizardry we see on screen? Christian Manz is one of the minds behind the creatures and visual effects that bring JK Rowling 's wizarding world to life.

Crimes of Grindelwald isn't the first time Manz has worked with director David Yates - he also has credits as far back as the Harry Potter films.

At the beginning of pre-production Yates challenged Christian and the team to push creativity on the film and to have fun with the creatures.

Christian recently gave a talk about his work on the film at The VFX Festival , Mirror Online caught up with him after to talk all things Fantastic Beasts, VFX and what the future holds for the industry.

No time to read? Click on the video above to listen to our interview with Christian Manz - with bonus secrets about Harry Potter and Dobby!

Fantastic Beasts creatures - the Zouwu

Zouwu

The film is quite the operation. There are 1,500 artists working on the film at multiple facilities around the world, with about 100 people working on a single character.

Harry Potter always had it's creatures, from the hippogriff to Dobby, but Fantastic Beasts takes it even further.

"The Zouwu was particularly difficult," Christian says. "It had to be one, what Jo had written, and two, what everyone wanted - the Chinese creature - and in the end we designed a particularly bonkers design.

"David, the director, wasn't sure at first. But one of our animators loved it so he quickly built it, modelled it, and animated it and that's what got us the Zouwu because David loved it."

The Zouwu is quite a detailed design. It's a monstrously large feline beast, as big as an elephant, with a striped body, scraggly mane, four fangs that curl out of its mouth, long sharp claws, and a disproportionately long, ruffled multicoloured tail.

"By the nature of its face it was quite hard, with big bug eyes, it's quite difficult to emote and you actually had to have quite a lot of subtle controls in there," explains Christian.

It paid off though, and ended up giving us one of the funniest moments of the film.

"The bit where Newt waggles the Zouwu's toy in the air, everybody laughs at that and that's because they're seeing something, everyone has a dog or cat that would do the same thing.

"What our animators do is study real animals, they closely study the natural world to see all those behavioural things. The big thing with the beasts is they are animals, not characters, but every dog or cat has a character."

When done right of course, the creatures give us some of the best humorous moments in the Fantastic Beasts franchise.

The Niffler moment we all missed

"With the Niffler - especially with the first and second film - you are trying to think of funny things," Christian said. "It's those things that lift it."

To create the funny moments, it's all about finding what's relatable, but it's also about the tiny moments you don't always see at first.

"With the Niffler there's the times he's dragging his belly on the ground or he's taking the gold," Christian says. "It's something you've seen, but it's subtle animation - again you see his little heart going under the feathers, you see the pauses, it's some of the most difficult things to do. I think it's as much of what he doesn't do as he does do."

Niffler

Christian adds there's one particular moment in the Crimes of Grindelwald that the audience don't always spot.

"There's a shot in there where which hardly anybody ever sees," he says. "[The Niffler] steals something in the background, with Eddie in the foreground as Newt, and he sort of is surreptitiously stealing something."

The movement and inspiration for the Niffler actually came from another animal.

"That originally came from looking at a honey badger rifling through someones rubbish in South Africa I think," Christian reveals. "The insatiable desire to get in the fridge and get the food. Nothing was going to stop it, and getting that over in this is what makes it funny."

Locations so convincing they tricked the French

While creatures are a huge part of why we love Fantastic Beasts, the actual world the wizards and witches live in is another.

Christian works with closely with Stuart Grey who worked on the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beast films to create the world we see on screen.

"A lot of Paris still exists as it did in the 1920s, and New York, so Stuart starts with concept images of all the different streets that appear in the film and he'll be using real locations, but using other buildings or shifting buildings around to create nice compositions."

The team then had a "shopping list" to take to Paris, where they spent a month scanning whole streets, whole buildings, taking thousands of photographs before they come back. They then have digital models of all those buildings to match the concepts for the shots they film.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

The data has to be shared with the facilities in the UK and Canada.

"We still shoot a lot of set it's not all green screen," Christian says.

They work off of this, creating shadows and effects so it looks "as real as possible". Sometimes too real.

"I did a talk in Paris recently and they asked us which parts of Paris we shot in and we didn't go there at all!"

...and using Harry Potter's Hogwarts again

Of course, one of the most iconic buildings - Hogwarts - is also brought to life thanks to Christian and the team.

For all the seven Harry Potter films they'd built it digitally.

"The team used the same material to re-build it and zhuzh it up for 2018," Christian says.

The Hogwarts interior was the same location for Harry Potter one and two.

For the Great Hall, they scanned the hall at Warner Bros Studio Tour London.

The Great Hall has had a makeover (Image: Publicity Picture)

"We digitally created the whole set, but using the real set in the tour and referencing all the photographs and the films themselves," Christian explains.

The Ministry of Magic was the same, with the team using drawings and photos from 10-15 years ago.

"We were ringing up sculptors asking for their work," he says. "This franchise is unique it's all there in the museum, so it feels as authentic as possible."

Harry Potter v Fantastic Beasts - what's changed?

Even though the first films still provide a wealth of material, things have changed since the first movie's release.

"The big change is the amount of visual effects content," Christian says. "When you go to Harry Potter tour, things like the hippogriff, that was digital but there was physical build of the creature. When you go to the tour you see they built a lot of stuff, which you don't necessarily do anymore. A lot is imagination based now. We can do more.

"If you were doing Fantastic Beasts at the time of Harry Potter, with New York, with Paris, we wouldn't have been seeing as much of that city as we're able to show today."

Evanna Lynch with a replica of Buckbeak (Image: PA)

That's mostly down to technology of course.

"Computers have got quicker, and artists, we're getting more and more experience every year.

"Visual effects is playing catch up to an industry that's been going for more than hundred years. The biggest difference for people coming into it now is they've got access to all of that, much more easily than I did, as a person who started not being able to use a computer."

There's plenty of young talent working their way up now too. The festival discovered 71 per cent of the future workforce aged 16-25 said they have a desire to work in the Creative Industries, despite an absence of careers guidance.

But Art and design is losing popularity, as both parents and students rank it as the least important subject to study at school, despite showing an increased interest in creative careers.

Christian Manz (Image: Warner Bros)

There's still hope for the future of visual effects, and plenty of work to be done - after all JK Rowling did say there's another three Fantastic Beast films...

But while people speculate how films will develop and use visual effects, Christian thinks there's one way it can go.

"There will be more of [special effects], but where's it is going is you won't notice it as much. Now it's a craft, the use of it now is to create a world and enable the director and writer to come up with things you wouldn't do before - whether it's a space ship or creature.

Kelpie

"Film making has been going towards more and more green, less and less set, and there's all the talk that there won't be actors anymore. I believe there will be actors, there will still be performance.

"The key thing with digital characters is getting the authentic performance and that's still driving ahead and us embedding ourselves into it."

For Christian it's "augment and not create as much as possible".

Augurey

What will really want to know? Will we get more Fantastic Beasts creatures?

"It's trying to push the envelope of what is fantastic," Christian says. "It's trying to find the next Niffler. That's the biggest struggle. The struggle for me is ideas really, not in technology. You just have to think of ideas. I think when a film captures the audience's imagination - with this type of film - is when they see something they haven't seen before - that's the hardest thing to do."

The VFX Festival 2019: Emerging Talent took place in February 2019 and was hosted by Escape Studios, a leading provider of VFX, Games, Animation and Motion Graphics courses. Join industry professionals at The VFX Festival 2019: After Hours or school and college students at The VFX Festival 2019: EDU events during June 2019; find out more at thevfxfestival.com